Building a Foundation for Success

We believe that the quality of our relationships creates the quality of our lives. If this is true then it’s vital to know how to effectively align your needs and desires with the needs and desires of the people in your life. Without this ability, it can be difficult to maintain the quality of relationships essential for creating the kind of life you truly want.

How can you know if someone in your life is on the same page as you? Are the same things important to both of you? Do you want similar results?

Establishing alignment is an essential ingredient for successful co-creation. In life, we often go about our own business trying to achieve our own goals, yet we are all still interconnected. These connections put limits on how far we can get in achieving our own results without cooperation.

The process of creating genuine co-operation starts with alignment. This is a process of getting clear about what is important to everyone involved at the deepest level of their core values. When you start building the alignment process on this foundation of shared values there’s less room for disconnection and disagreement.

This means making sure you establish alignment at a values level before you begin to create strategies for getting what you want.

When You Put the Cart Before the Horse

We often see people get stuck when they try to gain someone’s cooperation and they start the conversation by offering or asking for strategies. The trouble with this is that people usually have different ideas about which strategies would work best. It’s easy for disagreements about the strategies to end up sounding like judgments and justifications.

As an example, say you work in a very small office and a coworker at the next desk speaks louder than allows you to easily concentrate.

If you walked over to their desk with a strategy already in mind–such them keeping their voice down while they’re on the phone–the first thing you might hear is disagreement about how loud they are speaking or some kind of justification about why it’s important to speak with a confident tone of voice.

It’s possible to avoid the back-and-forth that is bound to ensue if you begin the conversation with a deeper level of understanding and connection. You can much more easily create the cooperation you want when you start by creating alignment around what you each value.

Why? Because at a core level we all share the same set of values and beginning a conversation by focusing our attention on these values stimulates our natural tendency for empathy and compassion.

Aligning with Success

Think about it. In this situation, wouldn’t each person want to experience consideration?

Would understanding be important to them?

Would they like to be free to make their own choices?

Do you think they’d like to be comfortable, relaxed, and free to express themselves?

Yes, of course they would, and so does everyone else.

So in this work situation, imagine having the intention to start your conversation:

• with no agenda other than cooperating so that everyone gets what’s most important to them,
• with an intention to first create understanding and alignment about what you each value in your ideal work situation,
• and without attachment to any particular strategies.

If this was your intention, you might start by letting them know there is something you’d like to get on the same page about.  Then request to have a conversation where you can discuss what’s most important to each of you about your work environment and relationships with your coworkers.

In that conversation, you might explore the value you place on being able to concentrate while working and their desire to be effective during their phone calls.

When Issues Become Opportunities

The volume they use while on the phone, and your desire for concentration, can become an opportunity to get more connected and aware of each other’s values.

This quality of sharing paves the way for you to co-create strategies for working together that ensure everyone experiences more of what they want.

This is how to begin co-creating a shared vision of success. Alignment paves the way for easy agreements and satisfying results that produces far greater enjoyment for everyone involved.

Of Course You want more Love and Intimacy in Your Relationship

We’re starting this post with the assumption that you want a satisfying and deeply intimate relationship with your spouse or significant other. If so, then it’s important to remember that the most successful relationships start with people who love themselves. The sooner you start giving yourself the kind of love that you’d like to experience in your relationship, the more fulfilling and intimate your relationship will become.

But do you ever wonder what the phrases “self-love” or “loving yourself” really mean, or what they have to do with creating a deeper sense of marriage intimacy? Even if you see the connection, do you wonder how to go about learning to truly love yourself?

Self Love Starts Here

Here’s the very first step: start noticing all the wonderful things about you! We know this might sounds simplistic, but you might be surprised how many people there are who, on a regular basis, simply ignore or don’t notice all the wonderful things about themselves.

“You must first love yourself before you can fully love another…” ~ Jennifer Good

How often do you stop and take the time to acknowledge yourself — to notice the things you enjoy about yourself? The best way to do this is to begin a practice of consciously focusing your attention on the wonderful things about you. Each morning make a conscious intention to notice and write down at least 10 things you enjoy about yourself during the day. When you go to bed at night, take time to review the list and appreciate yourself for these things.

Try It and Then Decide

This might sound a little silly, but when you start practicing this regularly you’ll be amazed how much better you feel about yourself, and how quickly loving yourself at a deeper level will follow. Once you feel this sense of self love and acceptance we guarantee it can’t help but stimulate more love, acceptance and intimacy in your relationship.

So now you know you know how to fill in the blank in the title of this post: Marriage Intimacy Begin With YOU.

So get out there and start consciously loving yourself–no one else can do this for you.

What’s new in the area motivation?

Daniel Pink on the Surprising Science of Motivation

www.ted.com Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don’t — Traditional rewards aren’t always as effective as we think. Listen for some illuminating examples.

Self Help Motivation Challenges

Self motivation can sometimes be challenging. Here are a few posts and a great picture we found surfing around the web.  We hope they’ll support you to stay motivated and create the life you truly want.

• The Willpower Paradox (scientificamerican.com)

• How are you doing it? (mytotalmoneymakeover.com)

• The Psychology of Motivation (helpingpsychology.com)

• Motivation on Tap (lifescript.com)

Motivational Self Improvement | Self Help to Calm Yourself and Be less Stressed

Being calm in life, and having mental and emotional calmness when you make important decisions, is a basic self help skill that we all need to master.

Spiritual Thinking & Tapping — Faster EFT

ETF to help you to live your dreams life.  Whether you’re looking for financial freedom, personal freedom,  self-esteem or • self-help motivation tapping can help.

Don’t Miss These 7 Self Help Motivation – Personal Success Factors

Feed Your Brain! Success Factors for Self-Help Motivation and Personal Growth Development.

A Little Push

“The only person that can really push you that little bit further in life is yourself.”

Author: stephaniedan

Want Happiness?

Each of us shares these same basic desires–to be happy and avoid suffering. We spend our whole lives pursuing this end. In this pursuit we mainly focus on improving our external conditions with the hope that doing so will help us increase our happiness, or at else trying to solve the problems that seem to prevent it.

But how much does this focus on improving our external circumstances actually help?

Create Happiness from the Inside Out

We believe one of the most valuable self help methods for pursuing happiness is to focus on improving our internal landscape–learning to shift the way we see ourselves and the world. This shift in perspective has helped more than anything else to improve our lives, increase our happiness, and to help solve any problems that crop up along the way.

What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: Our life is the creation of our mind. ~Buddha

The next time you feel tense, upset or uncomfortable in any way, remember this Buddha quote and then use your feelings of discomfort as an alarm bell signaling that it’s time to shift your attention from “out there” to “in here”.

Then ask yourself: “How can I relate to this situation in a way that will help me feel better than I do right now? What perspective can I adopt that will help me see the best in what’s going on?”

Be the Change You want to See in the World

The thoughts you choose will create the happiness you seek–from the inside out. As you practice the art of focused attention we guarantee your outer circumstances will begin to reflect the happiness you seek more and more often.

The No. 1 Obstacle

Many people say that the No. 1 obstacle when attempting to maintain marriage intimacy and create a healthy, happy relationship is the lack of good communication skills.

What do you think? Are you in an intimate relationship? Do you believe it’s essential to have good communication in your relationship in order to create the kind of closeness and connection you want?

If so, here’s a tip that we guarantee will help you do just that.

Start by truly understanding the other person’s point of view. Very often when couples start communicating about a problem or dissatisfaction the first thing they hear from their partner sounds like a criticism or a complaint. This is a critical point in the conversation and very often where the communication begins to break down.

This happens as often as it does because most people think in terms of strategies–what they want and the most effective way they think they can get it. This strategy often takes the form of a complaint–how you could change to help them get what they want or a criticism–what your doing “wrong” that is keeping them from getting what they want.

It’s Not About You

Understanding what someone deeply values or the need they’re trying to meet underneath the criticism or complaint is critical to creating genuinely satisfying relationships. Taking the lead in this area is something that you can do immediately to help improve the quality of your communication and in turn, your entire relationship.

Certainly, one way to find out what’s under their complaint is simply to ask them. It’s a place to start, but it’s not always the most effective way of getting to the truth about what a person really values. As we pointed out above, people often think in terms of their strategies as opposed the value or need that is stimulating the strategy.

If you began a conversation by talking about a problem in the relationship and you ask them what they want about the problem you may hear things like, “I want you to _____” (fill in the blank).

• Spend more time with me
• Stop being such a know-it-all
• Listen when I’m talking, etc

Dig Deep

Clearly, these statements just tell you what they want you to do, not what they value, not what need they’re trying to meet. Getting to the underlying values hidden in these statements may require a little detective work on your part. Don’t just take their answers at face value; dig down beneath the surface to find out what values are at the base of what they want.

As an example, let’s dig under these statements and discover what the person might value that had them say what they did.

• Spend more time with me, is probably stimulated by the longing for more connection or intimacy.
• Stop being such a know-it-all, could be a desire for acknowledgment or appreciation for what they know.
• Listen when I’m talking, might be coming from a wish to be understood clearly.

Once you have an idea about what the other person values and what’s most important to them, many other strategies will become obvious for helping them experience these essential qualities.

And for you, it will be much easier to relate them and want to support them then it would be if all you continue to hear was the criticism or complaints.